Buddhism in India – A religion of ancient India – History of Buddhism

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Buddhism in India – A religion of ancient India – History of Buddhism

Buddhism in India – Buddha

Reincarnation and the wheel

In the 500s BC, during the later part of the Vedic period in India, the idea of reincarnation became very strong among Hindus. Most people believed that after you died, you would be reborn in another form, and then reborn again, and again, forever.

But then people started to not like this idea. They didn’t want reincarnation to just go on and on forever. Wasn’t there any way to stop this; to get off the wheel of reincarnation and just be?

Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

A young Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama Buddha had an idea. He thought that you could get off the wheel of reincarnation if you were good and pure enough. He refused to be a prince anymore, and tried to spend his life being good and pure so he could get off the wheel.

Gautama Buddha had many followers during his lifetime, and after he died he had even more. Most of Buddha’s followers tried to be good while still living their normal lives – working in the fields or as soldiers, getting married, taking care of their parents and their children.

That’s where, about 100 AD, scholars developed the numbers (1,2,3,4) we use today. But they don’t seem to have heard about the research going on in Egypt, at the University of Alexandria, at the same time.

Buddhism spreads from India to China

At first, most Buddhists were in India. But by 500 AD, under the Guptan Empire, travelling Buddhist monks spread Buddhist ideas west to the Sassanian Empire. Other Buddhist monks went east to China and other parts of East Asia.

Indians go back to being Hindus

Nalanda University, India – A Buddhist university

By the 600s AD most of the Buddhists in India had gone back to being Hindus again. They still remembered Buddha, but as one of many Hindu gods. In West Asia, most of the Buddhists gradually converted to the new religion of Islam.

As Buddhism went out of fashion in India, the university at Nalanda began to be short of money and people. Instead, scholars went to the newer Islamic university at Baghdad (in modern Iraq). By the 1200s AD, Nalanda had closed down.

But Buddhism becomes stronger in China

In China, on the other hand, Buddhism got stronger and stronger. Soon most of the Buddhists were in China and not India. In China, just as in India, most Buddhist people continued to lead more or less ordinary lives. As in India, some Buddhist men and women left their jobs and their families in order to live in Buddhist monasteries as monks or nuns. But Chinese Buddhism was about meditation and action, not about scholarship and research. No new Buddhist universities opened there.

6 Comments

Hi Dr. Karen,
Thanks for publishing a proud feeling era of India. The evolution of Buddhism which teaches us how to live among humans is the principle of thoughts. This buddhism spread in world but now in India buddhism is living as minority. Hope the history will come back and once again teach to Indians how to live with buddhism and science.
Once again thanks for your efforts.

Thank you so much for taking your time to write such a well explained, accurate, and interesting description of history relating Buddhism. Our past is an important part of our present, and reading about it not only gains knowledge about the past, but it helps us better understand the world around us. This has really helped me complete my AP World History Project. I highly appreciate your time, devotion, and support. Thank you very much 🙂 I wish you a splendid day!

Sincerely, Stephanie

Karen Carr
August 29, 2018 at 6:04 pm

Wow, thank you, Stephanie! I’m so glad we could help. Indeed, you can’t really understand the present without knowing what went before. I’m even planning a series of articles now that relate the problems we have now to things that happened in the past.

I was just wondering if I could pick your brains about something? I read here (https://tinyurl.com/y7e7vupl) that Russian dolls actually originate from the Japanese depiction of an Indian bodhisattva, but tbh it sounds like quite a spurious theory..

Have you heard of this and, if so, is it true?

Thank you!

Karen Carr
December 18, 2017 at 12:53 am

I didn’t know that story before, so thanks for sharing it! But it’s probably right. It’s on the Wikipedia page, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll. And anyway it’s easy to confirm that there really were Japanese nesting dolls before there were Russian ones, and that the Russian ones got started just after Japan was opened up, which created a fad for anything Japanese.

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